By the time we'd completed our own version of a visit to Rotorua time was getting short so we moved rapidly northwards again.
I described Gisborne as a Kiwi Newquay but, and perhaps it was just that I'd been spending too much time in remote places, the seaside town and port of Tauranga gave the impression of being Newquay on speed. The Rough Guide said that, inside the ring roads and their ceaseless traffic, there were the remains of a nice old town. We never found it.
Instead we made a difficult circuit of Tauranga on a road that ran alongside the water and which I had thought was sure to offer a pleasant picnic area for lunch but which proved to be just a racetrack for vehicles driven by people in a hurry. Things became fraught as Lawson got stressed and I had to remind him that I hadn't been to the place before either.
Eventually we did find a long coastal road with a wide verge and picnic tables on the seaward side and large houses with balconies and sea views on the other, and paused just long enough to have lunch.
What a relief to return to the countryside and towns where everything we needed could be found on the one main street.
We had decided to press on to the Coromandel Peninsula but were ready to stop again by the time we reached Waihi. It was the sign indicating that there was a tourist information office that drew us to the top of the street. There we found what was being described as 'a Cornish-style' pump house beside a huge hole in the ground which is an open-cast gold mine.
Beneath the information centre is a small museum with exhibits describing how the pumphouse contained a steam engine which kept the mine dry when gold was being extracted from underground tunnels. Then times changed, it became too costly to mine the gold and the pumphouse fell into disuse.
But the mine had a new lease of life with the change to opencast working, and when it became necessary to expand the pit the pumphouse was in the way. But it had become such a familiar and significant landmark in the town, and part of its mining history, that it was decided to move the concrete building.
Most of the information centres ( i-sites) are run by the district councils, manned by paid staff and can book accommodation, trips and tickets for all sorts of things for anyone who needs the service but the lady in the Waihi centre explained that theirs is still only an information service manned by volunteers. She was interested to hear that we came from Cornwall, the county in which the style of the pumphouse outside takes its name, and that the preservation of mining history is also dear to the hearts of the Cornish.
Unlike Waihi Cornwall no longer has any working mine but the information in Waihi indicated that the community there knows it will not be economical to keep the mine working for much longer and that it must look to the future. One plan is to flood the vast bowl of the mine and turn it into a lake that will attract visitors.
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